Thursday, August 20, 2015

This is the sixth
and last of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 1999 Toronto International Film
Festival

My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog)

Herzog directed
actor Klaus Kinski five times in the 70s and 80s (most memorably in Aguirre: the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo), with almost uniquely
obsessive and fiery results: both megalomaniacs of sorts, they enjoyed perhaps
the ultimate love-hate relationship. Herzog relives their collaborations in
this memoir, much of which consists of fundamentally conventional
straight-to-camera dialogue and archival footage, but which given the subject
matter makes for rollicking weird and wonderful results. Kinski was capable
both of fierce irrational rage and almost childish tenderness; he could be both
courageous and cowardly, virtually simultaneously; he believed himself a
genius, and sometimes seemed like it. Given the evidence presented, it’s not
surprising that Kinski is no longer with us; looking at the astonishing clips
from their films, one’s primary mourning is likely to be for Herzog’s
apparently burnt-out fiction film career.

Happy Texas (Mark Illsley)

Two escaped
convicts hide out in a small Texas town, masquerading as gay pageant
organizers. The movie has been praised as something fresh and distinctive, but
I can’t really see why – it’s a fragmented, flatly directed series of mainly
familiar set-pieces and relationships. The film substantially dispenses with
its “gay” theme pretty early on, and also underexploits the central pageant
concept, limiting Steve Zahn’s transformation from rough-edged incompetent into
inspirational leader to not much more than a few montages. Instead, it spends
most of its time meandering through such unexceptional plot strands as Jeremy
Northam’s falling in love with a woman who fixes on him as a confidante, while
he simultaneously plans to rob her bank. There’s a rather touching performance
by William H Macy as the local sheriff discovering his own homosexuality, but
his character is fuzzy as everything else in the film; Zahn, although his work
here has been widely acclaimed, relies entirely on a bizarre stream of
senseless mannerisms.

The Limey (Steven Soderbergh)

In this
triumphantly experimental film, Soderbergh sets out to evoke the elliptical
existential style that flourished in the 60’s (in the work of Antonioni and
Bertolucci and, more genre-specifically, in John Boorman’s Point Blank). The Limey
casts two icons of the decade, Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda, in a sparsely
plotted thriller about a hard-edged British criminal (Stamp, naturally) who
comes to LA to investigate, and likely avenge, his daughter’s mysterious death.
Fonda plays the high-living record producer who, as her lover, becomes the main
object of Stamp’s suspicion.

Los Angeles as
seen here is a strangely desolate, hazy, yet spatially engrossing environment,
and lends itself ideally to the film’s temporal experiments. In virtually every
scene, Soderbergh flashes forward to episodes yet to come or back to images
from those already elapsed, or to fragments of memory (using footage from Poor Cow, which Stamp made in 1967), or
to alternative possibilities. It’s an in-your-face technique, and at first it’s
a little unsettling and not particularly productive: one realizes, with some
sadness, how easily the radical experiments of 30 years ago led to
stylistically hollow hyperactivity – what’s often called an MTV style. In its
opening stretches, The Limey merely
resembles an elegant application of a chaos theory to filmmaking.

But it quickly
calms down and coalesces. Stamp is wonderful as the calmly focused limey
Wilson, who’s spent most of his adult life behind bars, offering no
concessions: no one can understand his Cockney-slang saturated talk. His
considerable limitations, as an effective player in the seedy LA underworld,
actually invest him with a serene sense of liberation: there’s one excellent
scene, when Stamp cuts loose with a beautifully fluid but highly vernacular
monologue, knowing that not a word he says will be understood by the cop who’s
interrogating him. If such serenity is emblematic of a certain strand of
sixties culture, then it’s as if Wilson’s long confinement has left him
relatively unscathed by everything that’s happened since: in his morally gray
way, he’s an ambassador of integrity and stability (exemplified by Stamp’s
almost spooky failure to age very much).

The Fonda
character, by contrast, captivates his jailbait-aged girlfriends with indulgent
memories and echoes of the sixties, while positioning himself on the cutting
edge of the nineties – he’s an apparently perfect survivor and synthesis whom,
we find out eventually, is actually just a sham: involved in a shady deal to
keep himself afloat, hopelessly passive and dependent on his guns for hire. As
the classic Easy Rider rebel who’s
lately reinvented himself as ever-smiling, genial Oscar-nominated reincarnation
of his father, Fonda is also perfectly cast here. So the film’s style, as it
goes on, seems ever more eloquently questioning and disruptive as it wraps
itself around these two enormously resonant antagonists, always emphasizing the
fluidity of time, the echoes of moments just elapsed and premonitions of those
yet to come.

In addition to all
that, The Limey has a number of fine
supporting performances, several truly exciting action sequences, some
exquisitely funny lines. And at only 90 minutes, it has a concision that’s to
be admired – in any decade.

Summary

That’s the last on
this year’s film festival. To summarize, while acknowledging I could
necessarily see only a small percentage of everything on offer (and am
therefore no doubt grandiosely extrapolating on the basis of an unscientific
sample), it was a pretty good festival – one with fewer truly high notes than
some previous year, but with widely distributed, solid quality. I saw only a
few movies that can’t be recommended in at least some respect (All the Rage may be the only one I’d
actively urge people to avoid). My favourite – and I know I’m in a severe
minority here – was L’humanite (the
controversial Cannes award-winner which, sadly, seems unlikely to be
commercially released here). Runners-up: The
Limey, American Beauty, The Emperor and the Assassin, Dogma, The Wind Will
Carry Us, Tumbleweeds, 8 ½ Women. The first two of those are already in
release – see them now, and look out for the rest!

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Sometimes, if I
can manage it, I try to take off a little early on Friday afternoons to catch a
movie. It’s not much of a transgression because I usually come back into the office
on the way home and end up just about making up the time. Even if that wasn’t
the case, it still isn’t much of a transgression: colleagues know I do this and
no one thinks anything of it. But the other week, sitting there by myself
around 5 p.m., I started to feel distinctly guilty and uneasy. And this tells
you about the success of the film I was watching – Unfaithful.

Unfaithful

The movie is being
positioned as an “adult” alternative to the big summer blockbusters, but it
belongs there with them – it’s a theme park ride through the mythic landscape
of adultery. It has the accidental meeting, the initial attraction, the
deepening flirtation, the sudden capitulation, the enveloping passion, the
public sex, the obsessiveness, the anger at catching him flirting with another
woman, etc. Adrian Lyne directs with an atmospheric, composed eye; he never
lets a plain shot pass through the camera.

In a nutshell,
Diane Lane plays a seemingly happily married suburban wife, living prosperously
and affectionately with husband Richard Gere. One day, struggling against a
movie-strength wind, she literally bumps into a charismatic Frenchman (Olivier
Martinez) outside his apartment. He invites her in to clean up. She comes back
another day, then another, and they’re soon in the sack. After that she rapidly
loses it, neglecting the kid, getting cold on Gere, and getting sloppy in her
cover stories.

The film’s biggest
asset by far is Lane’s performance. She perfectly conveys the character’s loss
of control. It’s one of the best examples of sexual acting in memory –
sometimes surpassing Halle Berry’s Oscar-winning work in Monster’s Ball – and she’s the primary reason why the film is often
so unsettling. Actually, Lane must be an early favourite for this year’s award.
The biggest problem is that her performance isn’t sustained – in the latter
part of the film she recedes from us, becoming blander and more inscrutable.

But that’s the
film’s fault – not hers. The film takes the logic of the affair to its
nerve-wracking peak, in the process bringing Gere to the edge of a breakdown in
what may be one of his own best scenes ever. Then it abruptly changes
direction, and surrenders to much more mundane mechanics. Later on it coalesces
somewhat, but Unfaithful runs
distinctly out of steam. I liked the inconclusive climax more than many
reviewers have, but there’s no doubt it’s rooted more in mild artistic
desperation than in a coherent vision of where the movie’s going. I read that
Lyne shot six different versions of the ending, which I suppose will be a
selling point for the DVD around Christmas time.

I’m not sure the
conception of the lover works for the best either. Olivier Martinez is so
alluring he could make straight men turn gay, but he’s barely realistic – he hangs
round with supreme pouty self-confidence, always saying the right thing,
pushing all the right buttons. And Lyne’s trademark soft-focus style too often
blunts the material. Still, at its best I found the film more striking than,
say, In the Bedroom.

Spider-Man

Kirsten Dunst in Spider-Man (and by the way, I saw this
one on my own time) is no Diane Lane, but she’s probably the most alluring
challenge to a superhero’s fidelity to duty since Margot Kidder in Superman. This sums up the course of
mainstream cinema over the intervening 24 years – Dunst now is ten years
younger than Kidder was then. Everything about Spider-Man seems young – even the token old timers look artificially
aged, and Willem Dafoe sheds all his gravity in his role as the villain. Dunst
aside, the film’s greatest asset is probably Tobey Maguire, who keeps his
performance nicely nuanced and grounded. Maybe too grounded, for the film
always seems interesting rather than actually dramatic. That’s partly because
Maguire’s plausibility has the effect of pitching everything at the same level
of excitement as a slightly diverting homework assignment. Also, the plot about
the Green Goblin is unspeakably lame.

To me, the best
part of the movie was Danny Elfman’s opening theme music, accompanying an
elegant title design. Elfman’s music was also the best part of Planet of the Apes, and probably of more
other movies than I can remember. His Spider-Man
theme has an insinuating power and drama that the film seems uninterested in
matching. Maybe Elfman was actually a bad choice, and the film would have been
better served by something lighter and jauntier. Some have found the film’s
computer-generated effects a bit much – Roger Ebert for instance commented on
how the scenes of Spiderman swinging from one skyscraper to the next didn’t
evoke a real person. But I liked the idea of a man transformed into almost
abstract energy and movement. If you’re going to watch something created on a
computer screen, zip and panache help. Anyway, I think the ideal superhero
movie has yet to be made, Maybe Ang Lee’s forthcoming Incredible Hulk film will be the one.

Son of the Bride

The day after
watching Spider-Man (i.e. still on
the weekend) I watched the Argentinean Son
of the Bride, which was a surprisingly similar experience. It’s pleasant
and diverting, but never deeply engages, and the main attraction is again the
hero’s lively girlfriend. It’s another story of an early mid-life crisis,
except this time it’s a man who gets tired of his cellphone-hugging life running
the family restaurant, and tries to strike out in a new direction. The new
direction looks little different from the old one, which would be a nice touch
in a more subtle film. As it is, the movie meanders incredibly for two hours
before reaching an utterly predictable outcome.

The movie was
nominated this year for a foreign-language film Oscar which, given the
submitted films that weren’t nominated, may be the best recent evidence that it’s
true what they say about the Oscars. The character’s mother has Alzheimer’s,
but her long-time husband remains devoted to her, accepting all her problems
with serene equanimity. The film’s attitude on the condition seems much more
lazy than it does liberal, but it’s consistent with how the movie avoids showing
real pain or hardship (when he has a near-fatal heart attack, it’s glossed over
so quickly that I’m not sure his condition gets mentioned by name). For that
matter, I wonder how plausible it is that a film set in Argentina can so
consistently turn its back on economic hardship? Assuming you want the film to
which you sneak from work to be an easier experience than just remaining at
your desk, Son of the Bride would
have been a better candidate than Unfaithful
for an early departure.

Monday, August 10, 2015

With hindsight, of
course, we can identify all the major wrong moves of cinema history. Peter
Bogdanovich has been profiled a lot lately, on account of making a modest
comeback with The Cat’s Meow. It once
seemed impossible a comeback would ever be necessary. In 1973, after The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc and
Paper Moon, he ought to have been
unstoppable. Three years, three bad films, and much obnoxious behaviour later,
it was all but over. How much has he wondered since then about the road not
taken?

Michael Ritchie is
a less dramatic and perhaps more interesting example of how the course of a
career can change. In 1978, James Monaco’s book American Film Now profiled him (along with Cassavetes, Altman,
Coppola and Mazursky) as one of five leading contemporary directors. The Candidate, Downhill Racer and Smile had established him, but Monaco
noted with mild concern that Ritchie’s most recent film, Semi-Tough, was blander and less stimulating. After that, Ritchie
made a few films in which you could vaguely see thwarted ambition (The Island, Diggstown) and a whole bunch
of pandering, silly work (The Golden
Child, Cops and Robbersons, A Simple Wish). The decline appears
inexplicable, and almost deliberate. To my knowledge, Ritchie never expressed
regret over it.

Career Lows

On the other hand,
it’s long forgotten how Steven Spielberg stumbled early on with 1941 and then recovered his footing
within a couple of years with Raiders of
the Lost Ark. For that matter, just about all the big directors have a flop
in there somewhere, but they get over it.

I remember someone
saying that it’s incredibly hard and soul-destroying to make any movie, even a
bad one, and then just a relatively little bit harder to make a good one. I’ve
often wondered what it must feel like to invest yourself into a film for a year
or more, to traverse all the thousands of decisions that go into it, and then
to have it rendered instantly dead by a few bad reviews. I bet you didn’t know
that Johnny Depp directed a movie some years ago. Called The Brave One, it even had Marlon Brando in a starring role. The
film premiered at the Cannes festival in 1998, but got a horrible reception and
has barely been released anywhere. But if those initial viewers had reacted
differently, then maybe Depp would have gone on to direct again; maybe he’d be
known now as much for directing as for acting.

Of course, this
kind of speculation applies as much in any walk of life – we can all pinpoint
key moments of fate or choice where, with retrospect, the direction of our
lives shifted. It’s just that cinema, even more than the other arts, seems to
have a remarkable number of under-achieving careers festooned across its
history. To me this reflects its collaborative nature, the logistical
challenges in realizing a vision – compared with say writing novels, it’s much
more likely that one might simply run out of energy, or suffer plain bad luck.

Behind the Sun

Which brings us to
Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending.
Although it seems by now as if Allen has been in decline for as long as anyone
can remember, it’s only this film and his last, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, that truly scrape the bottom of the
barrel. Through his glory days in the late 70s and 80s, Allen communicated his
dissatisfaction with mere comedy, letting it be known that his ambitions lay in
greater things. He seems to have given that up now, but the flair’s all gone.
It’s not just the movies – his recent humour pieces in The New Yorker struck me as unreadable, and his brief return to
stand-up at the Oscars wasn’t much of anything.

One can stab at
explanations – for example, he’s not working with the same creative team that
sustained him for years. But you only need to look at Woody himself. He’s not
even in touch with his own film. He gesticulates and stammers and does his
shtick, but it’s sealed off in a vacuum. Hollywood
Ending has the gimmick of Woody playing a director who goes suddenly blind,
so he can’t look anyone in the eye. It’s appropriate in more ways than one.

That’s already
enough on that. Walter Salles directed Central
Station a few years ago – a Brazilian film about the relationship between
an old woman and a little boy. The film was sensitive and well-handled,
although somewhat soft-centered for all its grit (recent South American smashes
Amores Perros and Y tu Mama Tambien have made this even
clearer with hindsight). After that, I kept reading how Salles was going to
make an English-language project, though nothing’s come of it yet.

His latest film Behind the Sun looks largely like
marking time, although it also has a pandering quality about it that makes you
wonder if it wasn’t conceived as a calling card for the studios. Two poor
farming families carry out a deadly blood feud that gradually depletes their
ranks. An eldest son is granted a month’s truce until the other family comes to
kill him. He runs away and falls in love with a traveling circus performer, but
then feels he must return. The film is baked in acrid yellow dust and
glistening skin – it’s undoubtedly handsome.

Pull the plug?

But nothing in it
really matters. The film attends to its grand mythic scheme at the cost of much
immediate electricity. It has a distinctly flat quality, and lacks much of a
pay-off. I’m not saying it’s a failure exactly – I think it’s possible that
Salles achieved almost exactly what he was going for. Behind the Sun is substantially better than Hollywood Ending – it’s immaculately professional. But maybe, of
the two, its failure leaves you the more somber. At least one can rationalize
Allen’s film as coming at the tail-end of a career, after dozens of better
memories gone before. Even if Hollywood pulled the plug on him now (and they
haven’t – he has a new project shooting currently), we could be confident we’d had
the best already.

And yet – it’s not
that long since Deconstructing Harry
and Sweet and Lowdown – not Allen’s
best, but not disastrously far-off either. If Robert Altman can make Gosford Park at 76 and Manoel de
Oliveira can make movies at 94, should we give up on Allen yet? True, he feels
further gone than Altman ever did, but cinema is full of surprises.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

My wife knows a
couple whose son is a movie producer, and he recently produced a family film
called Virginia’s Run which had its
Toronto premiere at the Sprockets film festival – that’s the annual
kids-friendly offshoot of the Toronto film festival. They gave us a couple of
tickets, so we went up to Canada Square on Saturday afternoon. Virtually
everyone in the theatre seemed to be connected to someone in the movie, and
this wasn’t entirely a good thing (the grandmother of one of the actors was
sitting behind us, and she yapped away through the whole film) – on the other
hand, it made the experience seem much more immediate and tangible than a
conventional trip to the movies.

Virginia’s Run

That same week,
Toronto also had a Jewish film festival, a documentary film festival and a
black film festival, and in the past week or two there’d already been a
minority images film festival and French film festival. There may have been others.
When we saw Virginia’s Run, the
theatre was vibrant and buzzing. There were signs in the lobby for some kind of
animation display, and before the film, someone stood up and described where we
should stand afterwards in the event of being parted from the people we came
with (a practice the Scotiabank theatre might usefully adopt on Friday nights).
Just like at the film festival proper, the movie was introduced by the producer
and a “starlet” (that’s the term he used) from the film, but they seemed much more
light-spirited and relaxed than the people who introduce the adult movies every
September.

This was a great
reminder of cinema’s effectiveness at forging communities and sub-cultures,
even if they only exist for a few shining hours. Going to the Carlton for
instance, the makeup of the audience doesn’t seem to vary much whether it’s a
Taiwanese movie or an Iranian one or a French one. It’s an “art film” location,
and that’s the audience it gets. I assume most festivals market themselves more
strategically and get the word out to their target audiences. I’d love to visit
all of the Toronto mini-festivals at some point, spend some time soaking up
their different nuances and ambiences. At one or two a year, I’ll be through by
2060 or so.

Unfortunately, I don’t
think Virginia’s Run itself did very
much to galvanize the audience, not even the kids – it’s just too shapeless and
shallow (horse lovers will like it more than others will). Anyway, that was
that, and then (maybe feeling in need of something more adult) we spontaneously
decided to go to Changing Lanes, the
Ben Affleck-Samuel L Jackson urban thriller. I do the double bill thing
relatively often, but my wife never does. It was so exciting to have her along
– we even went to Taco Bell first.

Changing Lanes

There’s nothing
too esoteric about the Varsity Saturday afternoon audience, and there’s nothing
about the movie that would have required it to be. I don’t think Changing Lanes is quite as deep or as
subtle as some reviews claim. The movie is about a rich lawyer (Affleck) and a
struggling insurance salesman (Jackson) who get involved in a fender-bender,
from which the lawyer bolts. Arriving at court, he finds he left a crucial file
at the scene of the accident. Jackson has it, but won’t give it back. Affleck
pays a crooked computer hacker to have Jackson declared bankrupt; Jackson
retaliates by loosening one of the wheels on Affleck’s car.

When I describe
the plot that way, it sounds like the tit-for-tat of a Laurel and Hardy duel,
and the movie does have a blackly comic quality to it. It also has a rueful
moral quality, as both men reassess their values and behaviour. But since the
action is all confined to a single day, the picture can’t escape the feeling of
contrivance and excessive compression. The portrayal of the business world is
particularly superficial, such as the scene where a senior corporate lawyer, on
hearing a crucial document may have gone missing, takes about ten seconds to
blithely come out with a scheme to forge a replacement.

Changing Lanes is a fair-sized hit and it’s being viewed as a cut
above the formulaic melodrama. I think that only illustrates how much standards
have slipped. The film certainly evokes and refers in passing to a range of
serious matters, but it hardly pauses for contemplation.

Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner

The following day
I went alone to Atanarjuat: the Fast
Runner. The film runs over three hours, and at one point I had to get up to
go to the bathroom. I’d never noticed before, but the Cumberland 2 has an
emergency exit right next to the main entrance, and I went out through the
wrong door. I found myself in a corridor that clearly wasn’t the way I’d come
in, but I had no idea how that could have happened. I felt more disorientated
than I have for a long while, as though something fundamental had changed.

I think this
speaks to the effect that the film was already having on me at that point.
Arguably the most notable Canadian film in years (well, you can argue it’s the
most notable ever made), it’s a tale of the Inuit, spanning generations. The
film forges its own narrative and visual language so comprehensively and
successfully that you feel it’s mere coincidence that something occasionally
looks familiar (a shot outside a tent, capturing a silhouette of a couple
making love, is the sole example that I registered as a potential cliché).

Yet we can
recognize the rivalries and emotions and joys and frustrations, even if the
culture within which they manifest themselves is governed by radically
different expectations. These are nomadic people whose lives shift based on the
movements of the caribou and the seal. Their destinies are inextricably linked
to the environment, but the film seldom shows the animals – it sticks close to
the people, rendering them vivid and detailed even as they’re perpetually
dwarfed by the ice and snow. But Atanarjuat
is forged as much in legend as in conventional narrative. It seems
simultaneously both real and imagined.

When I went to see
Atanarjuat, the audience was almost
completely quiet, almost mesmerized. Maybe this is all one really needs to know
about how cinema creates communities. You put something unprecedented,
unimaginable on the screen, and the world will thereafter be divided forever
between those who’ve experienced it and those who haven’t.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

This week we have
films featuring three of my favourite actresses, all in good form and making up
to some extent for the flaws or limitations of the films themselves.

Human Nature

Being John Malkovich was greatly admired a few years ago, and I enjoyed
watching it, but I always felt I was missing something. I didn’t write a review
of it – couldn’t think of anything to say. Now the film’s writer, Charlie
Kaufman, has written Human Nature, which
has the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative bounds. Tim Robbins
plays a scientist who marries Patricia Arquette, a social outcast because of a
major body hair problem. Hiking in the woods, they encounter Rhys Ifans, who
was taken into the woods as a child by his deranged father and has grown up
ape-like. Robbins abandons his experiments with mice (he’s trying to teach them
table manners) and sets out to civilize the wild man.

Human Nature, like Malkovich, is a film of enormous invention.
Truth is, it would have been more effective with less invention. To the very
end, it concocts twists and reversals and crazy concepts, which means it never
gets close to dullness, but it’s like a girl who teases you to the point where
you decide to transfer your affections to someone else. The film usually seems
to be about the malevolent effects of civilization – how it quashes our better
natures – but it also hints cynically that we may not have a better nature. You
wish for a more consistent perspective, even if a more limited one.

The film’s
funniest moments come from an inspired silliness. Robbins’ notion of
civilization is about a hundred years out of date – he trains Ifans how to
behave at the opera, how to sit by the fire like a country gentleman, and so
forth (making for visual tableaux reminiscent of the best moments in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums). But this just illustrates the film’s broader
incoherence, since Robbins doesn’t generally behave in a way consistent with
these anachronistic notions, and the vague depiction of “the real world” dulls
our sense of the (presumed) injustice that’s being done to Ifans. There’s a
certain flabbiness to the concept too – the Arquette and Ifans characters are
both variations on the same narrow theme, and the fourth major character, a
conniving woman who poses as a French seductress to win over Robbins, makes
very little sense.

The movie couldn’t
be as affecting as it is if not for its actors. Robbins is rather bland, but Ifans
has a crazy grandeur about him. Readers may remember that I went to school with
him in North Wales. I often find him a bit strained on the screen, but maybe I
have too much of a sense of the man. On this occasion, his messy, abstracted
persona is exactly what the character needs.

As for Patricia
Arquette – she’s often very touching. She’s frequently naked in the film, and
her sturdy voluptuousness has an appropriately primitive air about it. She
strikes me as an actress who needs strong direction – when that’s lacking, she
seems to drift and recede (see for example her work in Matthew Broderick’s Infinity). That almost happens here too
from time to time, but in a film that’s purportedly about the quashing of
instinct, it’s not such a bad thing.

Murder by Numbers

Murder by Numbers has a much more concentrated and in part familiar
view of human nature. It’s the Leopold-Loeb story all over again – two smart-ass
teenagers team up to commit the perfect murder, complete with a trail of clues
that will lead the police to the wrong suspect. Except, of course, that the
detective is smarter than they had any reason to expect.

She’s played by
Sandra Bullock, which seems like proof of a soft centre. Surprisingly, Bullock
is the primary savior of this largely conventional film. Her character is
hard-edged, stubborn, cynical – none of that is new, but the movie takes her
into territory that’s unusually raw and fragile and sexually explicit. At such
times, it’s pleasingly reminiscent of Clint Eastwood vehicles like The Gauntlet or Tightrope, cranking the genre wheels while exploring the edges of
its star image. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t take this half as far as it
might have done, but it’s intriguing while it lasts.

The film’s
director Barbet Schroeder last directed the low budget Our Lady of the Assassins, about a middle-aged writer observing a
child assassin on the streets of Medellin, Colombia. That was an extremely
bleak, nihilistic work, consisting for long stretches of little but desolate
wandering punctuated by random killing. It sometimes seemed contrived, but you
couldn’t easily shake it off. It’s a rather ridiculous distance from that
chilling depiction of murderous youth to the teenage melodrama of Murder by Numbers. They say history
occurs first as tragedy and then repeats itself as farce – maybe movie careers
sometimes take the same form. But at least Schroeder is too much of a pro not
to make a smooth film, although even that much seems in doubt during the
rickety, cliff-hanging climax.

Triumph of Love

I suppose Triumph of Love, Claire Peploe’s
adaptation of a 17th century play by Marivaux, is the most
commercially marginal of these three projects. The film doesn’t really try to
have it any other way. Set on a sumptuous country estate, it involves a princess
who dresses as a male to win the heart of the man she loves – a man who views
the princess as a mortal enemy. She also wins the heart of her beloved’s
guardian, a famous philosopher who immediately sees through her disguise, and
the guardian’s sister, who doesn’t.

The movie isn’t
really ingratiating enough to be a popular success – it’s fairly repetitive and
narrow, and Peploe follows her own idiosyncratic instincts, sometimes
emphasizing the theatrical aspects, sometimes over-emphasizing the cinematic.
But it’s an entertaining romp, and the final scenes are particularly sweet. In
a cast that includes British heavyweights Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw, it’s
especially commendable that Mira Sorvino as the princess is the film’s single
greatest charm. Sorvino was hot for a couple of years after she won her
slightly generous Oscar for Mighty
Aphrodite, but a series of bad pictures put paid to that. She’s not the
most technically compelling actress, but when she’s cast properly she has a
combination of intelligence and winsomeness that I find very appealing (Lulu on the Bridge is probably my
favourite of her performances).

This week’s winner
– Mira Sorvino! Next time – battle of the movie caterers.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).